Two decades ago, I shot myself in the foot

This is my very frank and humiliating story. It’s a warning.

Two decades ago, I thought my “career” was moving into high gear. My fiend of twenty years, a popular TV star, wanted to make his own low-budget movie because somebody else made a movie about the TV show that made him a star.

I was the Co-Producer.

I thought — silly me — that because he loved a screenplay I wrote for him to star in, which he said was the best that had been sent to him, that “co-producer” would mean to also help him craft his personal movie into a really cool story.

Nope.

I had no say in content whatsoever. Instead, I was the scapegoat.

I was hands-on and it was a great experience: camera, acting, 2nd unit directing, arranging for stunt cars, creating the 35mm film prints, etc. But, in the end … well, it was the deadly “Hollywood creative differences,” and I was the loser.

It was exciting, though. I love production.

And this was an exciting project.

We had no permits. We just went out and shot stuff. Crazy stuff.

Crazy as in, driving through a neighborhood with the car on fire while I’m in the back seat with the camera. (I set the car on fire, I shot the scenes of it driving in flames from THE INSIDE … I LOVED THAT!)

We were in the outlying areas outside Los Angeles, and with a TV star to give us the cachet needed to slide through illegal shooting.

I won’t tell the story about the gun because I will never do that again! And, the RUST killing is outrageous to me because I know how guns on set are supposed to be handled, how to treat them safely. I am still stunned about that death because of sloppy onset gun handling.

I would hang out of a helicopter to get shots (now it’s all done with drones, but back in the day, you needed helicopter shots). I held on to the seatbelt and stood outside on the landing rack high in the air to shoot straight down on the action.

I loved it. I had done that before, too. It was my “specialty” among no specialties.

[FUNNY STORY: On one of the helicopter shoots, we were in the helicopter (GREAT PILOT!) following the action along a freeway, and heard on the radio that neighbors were calling the police to report someone (me!) was falling out of a helicopter! With the CA Highway Patrol suddenly in the air looking for us, we had to take quick evasive action. Our pilot (A GREAT PILOT!) found an opening near the home we were working out of, a clearing just barely the size of the helicopter, and landed it in such a small patch of land between trees that nobody could see us … and then we wandered across the road to the house.]

Goddamn did we have a blast shooting this movie! Production was a great experience. We were doing seat-of-our-pants filmmaking and I loved it.

I had concerns about safety, and there was a situation that was very, very difficult. Someone driving in our area, on the road we were shooting on, in cars like we were driving (it was a hot Ferrari, while I was driving a hot Shelby Series 1) crashed and killed a couple people during our shoot. Everybody we knew assumed it was us.

It wasn’t.

My souvenir from our production:

I do not shoot car scenes without extra people around. That is what made me furious about the train accident on the shoot for MIDNIGHT RIDER … there was no excuse, no reason for that accident; at the very very least for such a dangerous shot, there should have been several people with radios on each approach to alert everyone if a train was coming. That is something I know I would do, and had done. I am still stunned that anybody would allow such a thing to happen.

I do not shoot without permits anymore.

Like I said, I had no say in helping to craft the story, but I made a fatal mistake: I wanted to talk about how to market our film after it was finished. I had created 35mm prints in the can, but we still had no plan.

“Marketing,” it turns out, was a dirty word; he did not believe in marketing, he believed he had a top TV show because of him, not because of marketing, and that’s all that was needed for success. He very much disliked me for that.

And so I was fired.

(And, by the way, the movie “flopped.”)

That’s how a person shoots himself in the foot in this business. It was ultimately a complete negative in every way for my career.

But the actual production; every day of production was absolutely a blast and I still love it today, twenty years later. I love production.

Here is one video:

And as a gearhead who has loved cars since I could see over the steering wheel, this was a great experience for me: getting everything together for jumping the car over a river. I loved my part in making this happen!

This fantastic shot was “movie magic”! I had six main cameras shooting this jump, but at the last second, John thought to put a little home video camera on a rock near where we hoped the car might land. IT SURE DID!

Here is a different angle and I, crazy as I am, I am the guy operating the camera right below the car! I mean, who else could I ask to take that position?

In the obligatory “KIDS, DON’T DO THIS AT HOME!” footage, I had to show what happens after the spectacular stunt:

I should have had a great career, at least building car jumps, but that’s all CGI since then.

I should have had at least a mediocre career producing movies, but this turned into the opposite for me.

I shot myself in the foot.

This is my personal warning to filmmakers: just making a movie does not necessarily help your career. If you make the wrong choices, cut the wrong corners, it can kill your career. (And I am not the only one who learned this the hard way.)

BUT GOD HOW I LOVED EVERY DAY OF PRODUCTION!